The late Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s friend Kehinde Andrews laid the blame for Arday’s death at the feet of the media, saying Arday is “now dead because he’s black” and describing his death—Arday committed suicide on Friday—as a lynching.
I’m pretty sure I know which media he’s talking about, but it’s worth examining the role of Simon & Schuster, the KKR-owned publishing house that is raking in money from Arday’s book, Great and Unfortunate Things.
The Big Five publisher is still promoting Arday as a “renowned sociologist,” a “highly respected scholar of race,” and “the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.” When media outlets including the Free Beacon “had the temerity to scrutinize his obviously absurd life story,” Arday’s allies cried racism—and Simon & Schuster “stood by the book as proof of Arday’s fabulism mounted,” our editors write.
“The publishing house appears to have known something was amiss but seen green: It nipped and tucked the book along the way, acknowledging the possibility he could lose his professorship. It has also removed the video and audio from the book’s promotional page. A spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster, Julia Prosser, did not respond to a request for comment about why the publisher made those edits to the book proofs and whether it stands by the factual claims in the book—which it is promoting as a ‘memoir of overcoming remarkable challenges and responding to adversity with resilience’—in the wake of a New York Times report that concluded Arday’s claim to have been non-verbal until the age of 11, which is detailed in the book, was false.
“If Arday died at anybody’s hand but his own, the culprits are those who set him up for inevitable humiliation, some of whom are still profiting from his lies, Simon & Schuster chief among them.”
READ MORE: Simon & Schuster’s Disgrace
During his 2018 gubernatorial bid, left-wing Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed asked documentary filmmakers chronicling the campaign not to shoot a bookshelf in his home. They included a close-up of the shelf anyway—and a Free Beacon review of its contents may explain El-Sayed’s misgivings. The shelf “contained works by an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a member of an Islamic group that sought to establish a Sharia-governed state, and a Muslim cleric whose writings have influenced al Qaeda and other major terrorist groups,” our Andrew Kerr and Jessica Schwalb report.
The bookshelf came into frame as El-Sayed showed off his wedding pictures during a scene in the documentary, How to Fix a Primary. He told the filmmakers to “not get these things in the shot” because he wanted to keep it “secular.” Indeed, the shelf contained “about three dozen texts analyzing various aspects of the Muslim faith, several by Islamic extremists.” That includes Dream Interpretation According to the Qur’an, by Dr. Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, a Jamaican-born Islamic scholar whom the federal government named as an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and who now lives in Qatar after being deported or banned from several Western nations. He has defended the bravery of suicide bombers, touted AIDS as proof that “homosexuality is evil and dangerous,” advocated that young girls are fit for marriage the moment they begin menstruating, and argued husbands are permitted to beat their wives so long as the thrashing is “light.”
El-Sayed’s bookshelf also contained a copy of Reflections on the Quran by the late Irfan Ahmad Khan, who was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami, a movement founded in British India in 1941 that sought the establishment of an Islamic state governed by Sharia law. The government of India has banned Jamaat-e-Islami twice, first in the 1970s and again in 1992. Another book on the shelf, A Thematic Commentary on the Qur’an, was written by Muslim Brotherhood member Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali, who said “the refusal of implemenation [sic] of sharia is apostasy” as he testified during a 1993 trial in defense of 13 Islamic terrorists who had gunned down an Egyptian professor who called for the separation of church and state in Egypt.
“The collection of books on El-Sayed’s bookshelf reflects his scholarly interest in Islam, including in the darker corners of Muslim theology,” Kerr and Schwalb write. “Though he is openly running as a Muslim man, El-Sayed has sought to distance himself from Islamic extremism, including from beliefs he expressed before he went into politics. For example, El-Sayed declared to the New York Times in 2009 his sacred obligation to follow Sharia law in all aspects of his life, but later denied ever saying he lived a ‘Sharia-compliant’ life when asked about that statement during his 2018 campaign, the Washington Free Beacon reported.”
James Talarico is campaigning as a supporter of Texas’s massive fossil fuel industry. It’s a new development for the left-wing Senate hopeful, who once led a student protest calling for the city of Austin to divest from a coal-fired power plant that remains the city’s largest and provides 10 percent of its electricity, previously unreported video footage shows.
Talarico was one of three speakers at the October 2009 “Rise Up Against Coal” press conference, where he introduced himself as University of Texas at Austin student government representative “Jimmy Talarico,” called on city leaders to phase out the Fayette Power Project plant in favor of solar energy, and touted a student government resolution he helped pass endorsing a plan for the city to divest from that plant.
“It was a great success for environmentalists on campus … and also students who want to pay less with their energy bills and who want a sustainable economy and a Green Collar Economy when they come out of college,” Talarico said, referencing Democratic political operative Van Jones’s 2008 book Green Collar Economy, which marked one of the first public pushes for a “Green New Deal.”
Now, as Talarico runs for Senate in oil-rich Texas, he’s calling to “partner” with the oil and gas industry as part of what he calls an “all-of-the-above” energy approach. “Those positions stand in stark contrast to Talarico’s work at the University of Texas at Austin and in the State Legislature, where he represents a portion of Austin,” the Free Beacon’s Thomas Catenacci writes. In March 2021, for example, Talarico introduced the Texas Climate Action Act, which would have required the state to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 and by 90 percent by 2050, figures that are nearly identical to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
Additional Reading:
Abdul El-Sayed hasn’t exactly moderated since defeating his establishment-backed Senate primary opponent Haley Stevens, and Jewish Democrats in Michigan are worried: An open letter led by Detroit businessman Eric Bronstein is circulating “urging Jewish Democrats and independents … to sign their names in support” of El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, Jewish Insider reported.
Karmelo Anthony, the convicted killer of Texas teenage football standout Austin Metcalf, is challenging his conviction, and he appears to have a supporter in Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who recently suggested Anthony was either wrongly convicted or sentenced too harshly because he is black and “there were no black members of the jury.”
Socialist Angie Nixon is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Florida following her upset win over Trump impeachment stooge Alex Vindman. “I just recently became a member of the Democratic Socialists,” Nixon told CBS News. “I’ve also just recently become a member of the Working Families Party, and I let people know that nothing has changed about me.” That’s a winning message in a state with a large population of communist refugees!
California Democratic congressman Jimmy Gomez, who is under investigation for engaging in sexual relationships with staffers, says those relationships were consensual. Attorneys for one of the accusers disagree. They released a statement Wednesday saying their client spoke to the House Ethics Committee “about her experience of sexual harassment and assault by Representative Jimmy Gomez.”
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